I'll get to stage three later, but here in stage two, the industry remains very focused on doubling down on very bad ideas in the hopes an increasingly annoyed customer base won't notice. As we've been noting, the viewership for both cable and broadcast TV is dropping, particularly in segments like kids programming, where parents are finding better value (and fewer ads) via services like Netflix. What's cable's response to this growing threat? Start shoving more and more ads into each viewing hour:

"Beset by declines in audience, a majority of U.S. cable networks stuffed more commercials onto their air in the fourth quarter, with Viacom boosting its ad load by 13% across its cable networks; A+E Networks increasing the number of commercials it runs by 10%; and Discovery Communications adding 9% more TV spots, according to research released Wednesday by independent analyst Michael Nathanson. On the broadcast side, Fox raised the number of spots it aired by 15% in the quarter, Nathanson said, while ABC and CBS reduced theirs by 2% and NBC cut its by 6%."

Of course, cable and broadcast companies can get away with this because -- despite all the grumbling about cable companies -- the vast majority of consumers continue to pay an arm and a leg for vast bundles of cable content that they barely watch. By the time the numbers start to veer more sharply toward cord-cutting, many of these cable, phone or telco TV operators are going to be well behind the Netflix and Amazon eight ball. That will bring us to phase three, where cable and broadcast companies that refused to adapt will turn to their stranglehold over the broadband last mile, and start extracting their pound of flesh via usage caps.

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Advertising is a tricky business. Content producers can be as thoughtful and careful as they think they can be, and they can still make mistakes, really, really bad mistakes sometimes. Audiences everywhere are ready to jump on an ad that wastes their precious time or misleads them or offends some sensibility. But it's not always (ever?) easy to make content that is both compelling and also good for selling widgets (or promoting a message). Check out a few of these links on advertising campaigns gone a bit wrong.

Sesame Street also tweeted a mildly humorous joke about Serial. However, the children's TV show didn't provoke much backlash for making a pun related to a murder case. Not-for-profit muppets aren't apparently held to the same standards as retailers, but then again, Bert didn't actually refer to anything specific in the murder case. [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.

from the danger-danger dept

Over the summer, a research report came out detailing how "lawful intercept" offerings from Hacking Team and FinFisher could be used to hack computers via YouTube videos. YouTube quickly closed the vulnerability that enabled this (a man-in-the-middle attack on non-SSL'd videos), but it appears that criminals are still figuring out ways to use YouTube videos to hack your computer. The latest trick: exploiting ads on popular YouTube videos:

This was a worrying development: not only were malicious ads showing up on YouTube, they were on videos with more than 11 million views – in particular, a music video uploaded by a high-profile record label.

The ads we’ve observed do not directly lead to malicious sites from YouTube. Instead, the traffic passes through two advertising sites, suggesting that the cybercriminals behind this campaign bought their traffic from legitimate ad providers.

In order to make their activity look legitimate, the attackers used the modified DNS information of a Polish government site. The attackers did not compromise the actual site; instead they were able to change the DNS information by adding subdomains that lead to their own servers. (How they were able to do this is unclear.)

The traffic passes through two redirection servers (located in the Netherlands) before ending up at the malicious server, located in the United States.

The target here: computers using Internet Explorer (based on our stats, this means that most of the people reading this site were safe from this particular attack). Once again, we see how scammers are using traditional ad networks to do nefarious things. And yet publishers still wonder why so many people decide to use ad blockers.

from the rather-incredible dept

Today, as you may have heard, is Internet Slowdown Day, in which a bunch of folks are calling attention to the fight at the FCC concerning net neutrality. The basic idea -- as you may have seen on this very site -- is to host some "spinning wheel" banners, highlighting the kind of internet that we may have to live with if the big broadband providers get their way and are allowed to set up tollbooths online, picking winners and losers based on who will pay the most. We've been hearing that the big broadband players are a bit nervous about this -- as often seems to happen when it comes to real grassroots efforts. They've attempted to set up some fake grassroots efforts. We've even heard rumors that they've been trying to "infiltrate" planning meetings for Internet Slowdown Day. But this one takes the cake. In response to this campaign, cable's main lobbying arm, NCTA, has launched an advertising campaign that... um... looks kinda like the Internet Slowdown Day campaign, reminding people that they're nervous about Big Cable cutting off access. Here are two of the ads NCTA is currently running:

Of course, if you look at those ads, they actually (1) look like they're a part of Internet Slowdown Day and (2) remind people of exactly what they fear most about Big Cable: the inability to connect to certain sites. No one (and I do mean no one) thinks that, if the FCC implements true open internet rules, they'll suddenly be "unable to connect" to any particular sites. The only place where that's a fear is if the FCC doesn't put in place good rules and allows companies, like the cable companies NCTA represents, to start blocking access to certain sites.

So, either this a case where some ad designer at NCTA is a subversive double agent really helping "Team Internet," or the folks at NCTA and Big Cable are really so buried in their own wonkdom, they don't realize just how much this ad appears to support the other team. Either way, thanks, Big Cable and your lobbyists for highlighting exactly what most of us fear. An internet where we are "unable to connect" to sites because the FCC has killed off net neutrality...

from the because-it's-comcast dept

David Kravets, over at Ars Technica, has a good post detailing how Comcast is doing questionable packet injection to put its own javascript ads onto websites if you're surfing via Comcast's public WiFi access points. The practice was spotted by Ryan Singel, who saw the following "XFINITY WIFI: Peppy" ad scoot across his screen:

Comcast, in typical Comcast fashion, appears to be totally and completely oblivious as to why this could possibly be seen as a problem:

A Comcast spokesman told Ars the program began months ago. One facet of it is designed to alert consumers that they are connected to Comcast's Xfinity service. Other ads remind Web surfers to download Xfinity apps, Comcast spokesman Charlie Douglas told Ars in telephone interviews.

The advertisements may appear about every seven minutes or so, he said, and they last for just seconds before trailing away. Douglas said the advertising campaign only applies to Xfinity's publicly available Wi-Fi hot spots that dot the landscape. Comcast customers connected to their own Xfinity Wi-Fi routers when they're at home are not affected, he said.

"We think it's a courtesy, and it helps address some concerns that people might not be absolutely sure they're on a hotspot from Comcast," Douglas said.

It's a courtesy to hijack the page a person asked for and insert something that no one asked for on it? I don't think so. There's a reason that packet injection is considered an attack and a security risk -- and it's got nothing to do with courtesy.

Certainly, the website that Singel was browsing when he spotted it, Mediagzer, was not pleased about having its own site hijacked and defaced:

"Indeed, they were not ours," Gabe Rivera, who runs Mediagazer and Techmeme, said in an e-mail. In another e-mail, he said, "someone else is inserting them in a sneaky way."

Kravets also talks to Robb Topolski, the guy who first provided the evidence to show that Comcast was throttling BitTorrent a while back, kicking off one of the first big net neutrality fights (which resulted in the FCC slapping Comcast's wrists). Topolski notes that what they're doing here is technically equivalent:

To Topolski, what Comcast is now doing is no different from before: Comcast is adding data into the broadband packet stream. In 2007, it was packets serving up disconnection commands. Today, Comcast is inserting JavaScript that is serving up advertisements, according to Topolski, who reviewed Singel's data.

"It's the duty of the service provider to pull packets without treating them or modifying them or injecting stuff or forging packets. None of that should be in the province of the service provider," he said. "Imagine every Web page with a Comcast bug in the lower righthand corner. It's the antithesis of what a service provider is supposed to do. We want Internet access, not another version of cable TV."

But, of course, to the big broadband players, the last few years have been all about them trying to make the internet much more like cable TV, where they get to act as the gatekeepers and have much more control. The ability to inject their own ads into various webpages is just another bonus.

from the well-there-go-its-own-ads dept

Earlier this week we wrote about the latest ridiculous move by the City of London Police to inject ridiculous ads on sites that the City of London Police force deems to be "pirate sites." As we noted in our writeup, it's not always so easy to determine what is and what is not a "pirate" site. Here, let's take a look at the website of a company called "Project Sunblock." It's a "brand safety" advertising company that claims to scan pages that ads appear on to make sure that good ads don't appear on "bad pages." It's also the "partner" that the City of London Police are using to do their ad injection. Here's what the original BBC article about this operation had to say about them:

Project Sunblock detects the content of websites to prevent brands' ads appearing where they do not want them.

When a website on Pipcu's Infringing Websites List (IWL) tries to display an advert, Project Sunblock will instead serve the police warning.

Neither the police or Project Sunblock are paying the website in question to display the police message.

So here's the question: is Project Sunblock itself running a rogue site? Parker Higgins happened to notice that the company decided to copy the entire BBC article onto its blog. It seems to think it's okay to do that, so long as it includes a "first published by Dave Lee on [BBC URL]" at the end. But, of course, that's not true. The company appears to have just copied the entire article wholesale and put it on its own website. The BBC might claim that this is infringement. Assuming that, at some point, some genius at Project Sunblock may rethink this decision, here's a thumbnail screenshot (you can click for a larger version):

Of course, this sort of thing -- "ooh, nice PR article for us, let's highlight it by posting it to our blog" -- happens all the time. Because it seems totally natural and normal to most folks. Because it is. But it's also likely to be copyright infringement, especially in the UK where they don't have a pesky little thing called fair use.

But, really, it highlights the problem. The very company that is providing the tools to present bogus warnings to people that they're on a site engaged in copyright infringement is, itself, likely engaged in copyright infringement. Because, these days, it's almost impossible not to infringe someone's copyright at some point or another. Figuring out what sites are "pirate" sites and what sites are "legit" isn't so easy. When even the company the City of London Police signed up to do their ad injections can't figure out how copyright works, shouldn't the City of London Police think twice about unilaterally declaring sites pirate sites?

from the morally-pointless dept

Google's Adsense1 team has apparently decided that it is the morality police and that this 2012 story we wrote, about a lawsuit involving a porn star and the rapper Bow Wow, is somehow improper and a violation of Google's high moral standards. The story involves no nudity or porn. It's about how the porn star Katsuni (aka Celine Tran) was suing Bow Wow because a video for one of his songs used a bunch of video clips -- allegedly without permission -- from a music video by a different band (Electronic Conspiracy), which included video of Katsuni pole dancing. We noted it that wasn't a copyright case, because Katsuni doesn't hold the copyright, but rather she filed a publicity rights claim over the use of her image in the Bow Wow video. In other words: it was a fairly standard Techdirt news story on a legal dispute involving intellectual property. We embedded the two videos, which seemed rather important to demonstrating how the videos were similar -- the key issue at play in the lawsuit. We further noted that there was no nudity in either video, but they did show pole dancing, which might not be entirely safe for work, depending on your workplace environment.

A week ago, we received an email from the AdSense sales team, forwarding an email from the AdSense "policy team," saying that the ads on this page violated AdSense's policies, and that we had three days to stop monetizing the page or our account would be shut down. The specific concern was that AdSense's policy includes this:

Google ads may not be placed on pages with adult or mature content. This includes, but is not limited to, pages with images or videos containing:

Strategically covered nudity

Sheer or see-through clothing

Lewd or provocative poses

Close-ups of breasts, buttocks, or crotches

We immediately appealed the decision, noting the ridiculousness of the claim. It was clearly a news story, not "adult" content. One of the videos in question was even hosted on YouTube and had Google ads enabled on that video. In fact, we've since discovered that both of the videos in question are on YouTube and have Google ads. You can see the original video here and the Bow Wow video here. Both of them are monetized by YouTube with Google ads. And yet, somehow we're the ones violating Google's policies?

We got back a short note yesterday, telling us that our appeal was rejected and we needed to remove ads from that page immediately. Here was the entire explanation:

It looks like the video in question is fairly suggestive (ie there is a picture of a stripper pole) . I would not consider this instance a false positive, please ask the publisher to stop monetizing.

Note the vague standard being used: "fairly suggestive." And also the impeccable level of scrutiny employed: "looks like." Yippee for such a data driven analysis.

Again, this was on a news story about the copying between the videos, and the very same videos are found on YouTube where they are both monetized by Google's ads. Furthermore, it's not as though Google shies away from ads involving strippers. Here's a Google search I just did (which I may now need to explain to my wife, should she look at my history):

So, what possible purpose does this serve? Since we weren't set up to deal with deleting ads on specific pages like this, we had to have two people waste much of their time yesterday figuring out how to remove ads from a page that got less than 50 pageviews over the last year, just to please the ridiculous morality police at Google AdSense, who have a problem with a news report embedding a video that they themselves are monetizing on YouTube.

To put it simply: this is idiotic. Yes, Google has the right to make its own decisions about what it will allow ads on, but you would hope that there was at least some common sense employed. While we (thankfully!) aren't reliant on these ads as our main source of revenue, the whole situation is ridiculous. You could see how other news sites might even change their own reporting to avoid having to deal with such ridiculous and arbitrary policies from Google's nameless morality police.

For our part, we've actually been hard at work for a couple months now on some new sponsorship opportunities that we're increasingly hoping would let us do away with display advertising altogether. Before this we thought maybe the two could co-exist but, frankly, I'd love to just dump AdSense from the site outright at this point, given this sort of intrusion. If you work for a company that would like to be loved by our community for helping us to get rid of display advertising altogether, while also providing great content to a great and engaged audience, contact us ASAP. Alternatively, for individuals, feel free to support us over at the Insider Shop, where we've got some lovely items and services for sale.

Separately, because people will likely bring it up, about a month ago, a story made the rounds about a big conspiracy within Google to cut off AdSense users after they'd accumulated a fairly large amount of revenue due, allowing Google to then keep that revenue. The story seemed far-fetched, because even just some quick back of the envelope calculations would call into question how such a program could possibly make sense. Google would be cutting off revenue earning partners to "steal" one month's worth of revenue? How could that possibly make sense? Either way, Google quickly and convincingly denied the whole thing. And it's unlikely our situation has anything to do with that story, anyway.

That said, Google is somewhat infamous for arbitrarily cutting sites off with little to no warning or explanation. There are tons of reports of people who suddenly had their AdSense accounts shut down with basically no recourse whatsoever. Just a week or so ago, the company Free Range Content (disclosure: which provides the "Repost.us" syndication technology we use on our site) filed an interesting lawsuit after having its own AdSense account shut off. The details of that story seemed particularly bizarre. Free Range Content had actually noticed odd behavior with the account itself and alerted Google to the issue, specifically noting that its revenue seemed way too high for the given period. Someone on Google's AdSense team agreed to meet with Free Range Content, but two days before the meeting the entire account was shut down, and Google refused to give any explanation or present any recourse at all. At least we were given a heads up and a (absolutely ridiculous) reason.

Given stories like this, you can certainly see why people get so frustrated and fearful about the power that Google potentially has. Just the fact that there's an implication that we should change what we report on just to keep ads on our site seems immensely troubling. The fact that Google's AdSense policy team stood by the decision after we appealed suggests a broken process. While it seems likely this is a case of sheer and utter incompetence rather than malevolence, you can see why some people fear companies like Google.

1. A little background on Techdirt and AdSense: While we had experimented on and off with Google AdSense over the years, a few years ago we completely took them off the site (2011, I think), in part because of another ad relationship we had, but also because we found the performance to be abysmal. Just a few months ago, a sales team at AdSense made a very aggressive push to get us to start using it again, insisting that the performance would be much better and sending over "predicted revenue" that was significantly higher than we were getting at that time. We were skeptical, but also frustrated and annoyed with our existing ad provider, who all too frequently let through awful and obnoxious low quality ads (that we had to have someone monitoring constantly to remove), despite promises to keep them off our site. After running some tests, and realizing that Google clearly was very much overselling what AdSense could do, we still agreed to switch, in large part because the other solution we were using was so bad, we figured even if the payouts were similar, at least the experience would be marginally better. The terms of our deal forbid us from revealing how much we make from AdSense, but it's really not that much. We're basically covering our bandwidth bills. We're not making any profit from it at all, but we've kept it around to keep from flat out losing money on our hosting bills. ↩

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Advertising is a difficult business. Companies want to make people aware of their products, but not everyone wants to be bombarded by various offers for products that they might not want or need. For consumer goods, it's sometimes possible to avoid being annoying by making ads that are amusing -- so the audience at least gets a laugh or some entertainment value out of the experience. Here are just a few examples of promotional campaigns that might be somewhat humorous.

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

The Super Bowl -- uh, "the big game" -- commercials last weekend had a few ads that demonstrate (again) that people will actually want to watch commercials if they're done properly. But sometimes it's the train-wreck commercials that you just can't stop watching. Here are just a few really (really) bad lawyer commercials that might be so bad that they're actually entertaining.

from the bitcoin-mining-scams-on-the-rise dept

A decade ago, it was actually fairly common to see various "distributed computing" projects seek to put a variety of people's computers to use to tackle tough problems -- and sometimes those distributed efforts involved clearly revealed and transparent code within other applications. A couple years ago, just as Bitcoin was first starting to get attention, I remember hearing from someone who was talking about trying to build a media player that would look to offer licensed/authorized content in exchange for quietly being a part of a Bitcoin mining effort. Nowadays, it appears that this idea of creating secret distributed Bitcoin mining is taking on a somewhat more questionable reputation. A gaming software company was whacked with a $1 million fine after (the company claims) a "rogue employee" included some Bitcoin mining hidden within their app. There have been accusations that a number of other apps out there are also secretly mining bitcoin.

Just recently, we noted that Yahoo users in Europe were exposed to malicious ads that were downloading malware. It's now come out that the malware was... Bitcoin mining software, which sought to use some of everyone's excess computing resources to hunt for more Bitcoin. As "malware" goes, this is actually a lot less damaging than some other stuff out there (keyloggers designed to steal bank info, for example). It likely would bump up electricity bills slightly for some users, and basic PC mining is pretty ineffective, but it's interesting to see that malware folks are taking such extreme steps to try to build secret Bitcoin mining networks.

Of course, it still seems like doing this kind of thing in an upfront way might be an interesting business model: offer some useful software for free, telling folks very clearly that the "payment" is that they'll be using some of your spare cycles for mining. Of course, it might be better if this was done for cryptocurrencies that weren't so damn inefficient with electricity -- something like Peercoin instead of Bitcoin, for example. I imagine it's really only a matter of time. Imagine a Netflix/Hulu competitor that offered you the content for free, in exchange for distributed computing power, paying the licenses out of the proceeds from the mining. It's not that crazy when you think about it...